Guillermo del Toro's latest directorial effort Pacific Rim is that most frustrating of good movies: the kind that could have been immeasurably better with very little effort at all, and no matter how enjoyable it may be (which is frequently very much in this case) that enjoyment is forever shadowed by the even better version of the film lurking just out of sight.
Pacific Rim, is about giant robots, giant monsters and the point where those two things intersect violently. Very little time is wasted in establishing this: two title cards give us the names and definitions of the Kaiju (the monsters, so named for the Japanese genre films from which Godzilla and company hail) and the Jaegers (the robots), our protagonist Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) talks us through the early years of the human-Kaiju war and the creation of the Jaegers over a whirlwind of news footage, a short fight scene whets our appetite and establishes the tragic death of Raleigh's brother Yancy (Diego Klattennhoff), then it's off to the races.
Except not quite. It's at this point that the film brings us into its present day in 2025, and things slow down for a good while. After his brother's death Raleigh has resigned from pilot duties and turned to working for rations where he's found by general Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), who pulls him back into the fold to pilot his old Jaeger, one of only four left in the world after the Kaiju redoubled their efforts to wipe out the human race. He's brought to the Jaeger program's last outpost in Hong Kong, where he meets the other remaining pilots as well as Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), a pilot-in-training whom he immediately develops an interest in (although not, blessedly, a romantic one). What follows is 45-odd minutes of life at the base, intercut with a comic B-plot revolving around Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day), an obsessive Kaiju fanboy and his quest to acquire an intact Kaiju brain from Hannibal Chau (del Toro stalwart Ron Perlman), a black-market Kaiju organ dealer.
The script for Pacific Rim (co-written by del Toro and Travis Beacham) is not short on flaws. The dialogue is wooden and only comes in "expository" and "forced levity" varieties, exacerbated by the fact that, with the exception of a single speech that was in all of the trailers anyway, it's consistently doled out inversely relative to the talents of the actors it's given to. The biggest problem, though, is that Raleigh is just a godawful protagonist. Hunnam's performance is completely blank, and the character gets little to do except quarrel with the Australian Jaeger pilots (Max Martini and Robert Kazinsky, who owe the entire country an apology for their accents) and be generally surly. He's a big old heaping of vanilla all over the film, smothering the otherwise light tone and weighing down the early going with endless scenes of empty moping. He's not even enough of an inexperienced blank slate to serve any kind of audience-identification purpose, so we end up far more in tune with the greener Mako than we ever do with Captain Whitebread.
It's not hard to envision a version of the movie where Mako, who has just as much of a history with the Kaiju and a far more interesting relationship with Pentecost, among other things, is the protagonist and Raleigh is relegated to a supporting role or scrapped entirely, and it's this that I had in mind when I suggested that the film could have been easily and significantly improved. The removal or sidelining of Raleigh may not have resulted in the best possible version of Pacific Rim (which to my mind would need to have been made with rubber suits and miniature sets) but it would have resulted in a Pacific Rim with more clarity of purpose, better characterisation and a running time that came in a good 20 minutes shorter.
If Pacific Rim is too hamstrung by its weak script to ever be considered amongst del Toro's best work, it's perhaps even more of a testament to his abilities as a director than some of his better films, because he saves much more of the material from itself than I would have thought possible. Starting from a breathtaking opening shot where the night sky turns into the deep ocean, the film is stuffed full of some of the most memorable imagery to play on screens this year, albeit not quite as much as a Hellboy II or a Pan's Labyrinth. Even when he's not straight-up showing off, he keeps the film operating at a level of visual splendour that keeps the worst elements of the script at arm's length - I'm particularly fond of a visual motif involving various particles drifting in a blanket across the screen. An extended flashback to Mako's childhood should be excruciating on paper (and it still is a little, but only due to the unwelcome presence of Raleigh, The Beigefather) but in del Toro's hands it's a small masterpiece of poignancy married with visceral terror, and grounds the entirety of the monster action in the rest of the film with a sense of scale and genuine stakes.
Visually the film only has one real flaw, but it is admittedly a serious one: the Kaiju are simply not interesting to look at. This is disappointing (to put it mildly) coming from a director who has spent much of the last ten years gracing us with some of the most inspired and memorable movie monsters to grace the screen since movie monsters went out of fashion, and especially from that director's self-proclaimed love letter to the iconic B-movie monsters of yore. For starters, the monsters of Pacific Rim have a worrying tendency to disappear into the backgrounds of low-lit scenes, and since we only ever see them attack at night that's very nearly all the scenes they appear in. Even more disheartening is how interchangeable the whole lot of them are; a late fight scene features a Kaiju who we are assured in dialogue is the Biggest Baddest Most Threatening Kaiju Of Them All, and I could not for the life of me tell you which of the three on-screen monsters it was supposed to be. I also would have personally preferred that the entire species' unifying aesthetic couldn't have been quite as easily summed-up as "like the Cloverfield monster, but with glowing neon bits", but that much at least is a matter of taste.
Ultimately, though, the Kaiju are there to have the holy hell beat out of them by giant robots, and Pacific Rim delivers on that front far more successfully than its uninspiring marketing campaign had led me to expect. There is a weight and a "crunchiness" to the setpieces that is all too often absent from CGI-dependent blockbuster movies. That, coupled with a childlike sense of glee and an uncommon dedication to preventing civilian casualties gives the action a giddy thrill that secures it firmly near the top of the 2013 Summer season. Six years after Michael Bay seemingly ruined the concept for everyone in Transformers, we at last have a CGI-age giant robot picture that delivers on the promise of that concept. It's far from perfect but it's a it's a wholly successful proof-of-concept, and hey, that's what sequels are for, right?
7/10
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